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Saturday, September 20, 2014

Kool-aid Dyed Yarn

So Jess picked the fox socks for the kids Christmas presents, which I'm super excited about! When I went to investigate my stash for fox coloured yarn though, there was of course nothing useful. (This is the secret behind the growth of yarn stashes.) There was however this beauty:

I grab any colour of real wool that I come across in thrift stores, as long as it isn't super scratchy. At 2$-3$ a ball I can't complain!

Can't you see the foxy potential? The first thing I did was to find both ends and roll them into balls at the same time, to divide the yarn roughly in half. (I don't actually recommend trying this, it resulted in a tangled mess and took forever.) I then wound each ball into a big loop and dyed it with 2 packets of either red or orange Kool-aid and this tutorial.

It always seems so neat to me that the water ends up crystal clear when you are done!

After putting my house guests to work helping me untangle the colourful and now dry yarn, the result was this:

Because if I'm making them the same thing it can't be the same colour. That's no fun!

This is actually the second time I've done this. Last Christmas I knit Deacon a sweater. I had the main colour but needed small amounts of two accent colours, and wasn't interested in buying two giant expensive balls of yarn just for that. I had a drawer full of small balls of white wool, so the Kool-aid search began. (I had a surprisingly hard time finding any place that sold more than two flavors.) The result was the blue and burgundy (a mix of grape and cherry) that you see in the sweater as well as the lime green ball that didn't get used.

Here's proof that it's colour fast. Deacon wore this all of the time until he outgrew it. :)

Pretty fun eh? Bet you'll never look at your stash the same way again!